Four things

A) Four jobs I have had in my life:

These are my first four jobs, actually, not counting the very first one which was too boring to mention.

Valet parking, graveyard shift
There’s a strict hierarchy for casino employees, mostly based on which jobs get more tips. Dealers are the biggest earners; then cocktail waitresses and certain of the hotel staff, below them the valets, then you’re down to the invisible people, the cooks and cleaners and the guy who walked around all day stamping the casino logo into the ashtrays. By rights I should’ve worked a year or two in one of the crap jobs first, but somebody high up in HR was one of my dad’s patients, a fact I wasn’t too proud to exploit. The strictly enforced official rule was that you reported one tenth of your actual tips to the IRS; the rest was effectively under the table profit. I worked all the shifts at some point but preferred graveyard: there were only two guys working nights, and the job really only needed one, so except for a busy hour or two at the beginning of the shift we’d take turns taking hour-long naps in the break room. So for just four or five hours of relatively quiet work each night — plus a total dissociation from normal human society and, you know, daylight — you could get the same share of tips as the guys on swing shift who had to sprint for cars constantly through their entire shift. Great deal.
Lab assistant
This technically wasn’t a job; I was getting course credit. But I did get a paycheck, and I loathed being there, so in that sense it was a job. I had made it through the two washout years of aerospace engineering, the killer math and physics courses; from here on it was mostly going to be lab experience, real engineering work. Very exciting. I was assigned to help a graduate student measure the shape of colliding oil droplets in a vacuum, which was quite possibly the most thoroughly dull, pointless, and demotivating task I have ever had to work on. The grad student had been at it for a year, and figured it was about half done. It was at this point that I began to realize that maybe I didn’t want to be an engineer. One day I dropped an expensive ceramic component which had taken a week to acquire, neatly snapping it in half, walked out the door and never went back. I kept getting paid for the rest of the year, probably because if the grad student had reported my absence, they’d have just saddled him with another idiot undergrad who’d break his equipment. I switched to film school.
Door-to-door baby photographer
I had just graduated, and saw an ad in the local alt.weekly paper offering jobs for photographers. Young enough not to know yet that legitemate jobs don’t advertise in local weeklies, I showed up for the interview with my clamshell portfolio box of matted black-and-white class projects, ready to begin my career as a Professional Photographer. I was offered a job driving to the homes of parents who had answered a corresponding ad in probably a different section of that same weekly, offering free in-home portraits taken by a Professional Photographer. Which was true, they could get one tiny print for free, or they could pay for the full package of wallet-size etc on up. So, basically it was a sales job. I lasted exactly one day, which I spent in “training”, riding around with one of their current photographers visiting a range of mostly downscale homes in suburban Seattle, setting up what turned out to be a surprisingly sophisticated lighting rig and medium-format camera while the salesman poked at the baby and upsold the parents to the poster-sized photo package. The moment when I realized this was not the job for me was when we came to one of those minor traffic jams where everyone can see you’re going to have to merge into one lane, so most people line up in that lane before the obstruction, but a few jerks zoom past everyone as far as they can before cutting in at the last minute. The salesman was one of those guys.
Temp
I know, everybody was a temp at some point. I liked it, though. The office jobs were usually data entry or filing, just short enough to not be boring — but there were always weird and interesting exceptions: one semi-long-term job I had was helping to sort and categorize millions of pages of documents from a class-action lawsuit that had been going on for over a decade. New workers were given a half-hour overview of the case, so they’d know why they were sorting through all these pages of testimony and medical records: an entire town in California was suing a group of companies: chemical factories, deformed children, you know the rest. The overview they read you was obviously written by the side representing the town, the feel-good side of the case. After working there a week or two, though, it’d become clear from the documents you were reviewing that you were actually working for the chemical companies. A few people quit when they realized this, but most stayed: It was an exceptionally good temp job. The pay was higher than usual, some of the documents actually made interesting reading, and you were working as part of a large group of temps, not as the one impermanent guy among the real employees.

C) Four places I have lived

Los Angeles. College; the first time I lived anywhere that wasn’t Lake Tahoe. I didn’t have a car the first couple years, so was mostly stuck around the same small area downtown; every once in a while when I couldn’t stand it anymore I’d spend three hours on a bus getting to Venice Beach. When I finally got a car I discovered the beach was actually only twenty minutes away.
Seattle. This is the first place I moved to on purpose, the first place I got a job on my own, the first place I rented an apartment, the first place I did, well, a lot of things for the first time.
Troy, NY. I had just gotten back from months of backpacking slackerdom, drove to the east coast for the first time to attend a grad school I had never visited. First time I experienced real cold: Tahoe is snowy, but never gets below 20F. One morning in Troy, I set a cup of coffee on the roof of my car while I unlocked the door. When I went to pick it up again, it had frozen in place.
Denver. I only lived here one week a month, a compromise partial telecommute from Chicago. Two of us had been recruited here from our previous job in New Jersey; he moved to denver fulltime, and when I was in town I slept in his guestroom. He fit many stereotypes: software developer, intensely shy, big apartment in generic high-end housing complex with no furniture except for a very expensive home theater system. Which he never managed to get all the components to work together.

E) Four places I have been on vacation:

Europe, in toto. Yet another slacker eurail hostel backpacker, beginning and ending in Amsterdam of course. An irreplaceable experience which I don’t know why I feel the need to downplay it. I could arrive in any city in any country at any time of the day or night, confident of finding someplace to live on the cheap, food, and new friends to hang out with if I felt like it. I’ve never had that kind of self-confidence before or since.
Bali. Honeymoon. Absurd luxury travel at a level I’ve never come close to repeating. Nice people, too.
Australia. Wouldn’t mind moving there. Winters at least.
Lake Mead, NV. Year after year for most of my childhood, every Thanksgiving and often again in the spring, to stay at Aunt Maddy’s double-wide, waterski, camp out in one of the zillions of beach coves, and develop an improbably strong lifelong preference for high temperatures, bright sun, and dry air.

H) Four things I enjoy doing:

Predictably, censored
Also censored, but for different reasons
Being in wild, empty places, alone.
Being in large freaky happy crowds, the sort where face paint and idiosyncratic costume (or none at all) are the norm.

I) Four places I would rather be right now:

In bed, asleep. Insomnia struck last night, up till 5 for no apparent reason; woozy and petulant all day, and expected to have crashed out by now. Haven’t yet.
In late May, or early June. Yes, I’m already bitching about impending winter. Sorry.
In a post-singularity virtual world, editing my environment and my self. Hi, I’m an geek.
In a whirlwind of creative activity.